Of all the urban homesteading skills—from bread-baking to knitting to housing small animals—none daunt like the art of canning.

I don't come from a family of homemakers. My mom, God bless her, could barely cook. My Irish grandmother owned businesses and taught me how to save money, pour a beer, and wink. I don't think she ever put on an apron.

When I grew up and had kids, the more moms I met who could bake and make Halloween costumes, the more I admired and envied them and their skills. But when I tried to be that kind of mom, it was mostly an epic fail.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

And now the bar's been raised further with the whole urban homesteading trend and its attendant self-sufficiency angle. Yes, I would love a couple dozen backyard chickens. My landlady? Probably not so much.

I've failed at gardening. I suck at knitting. I've been trying to screw up my courage to bake bread for years now. I did make a couple of sock puppets once when my kids were really little… too little to notice the pathetic sewing job on the button eyes.

More From Redbook

If I were a real homesteader, I'd have starved or frozen to death by now. Fortunately, because I live in Los Angeles, all I actually have to know is where to park at the farmers market.

So I wasn't prepared when a large box arrived from my editor containing a home-canning appliance. Canning?

She, like me, is an urban sort of gal who has fantasies of knowing the womanly arts circa 1914, but can't find the time (or the acreage) to learn. So she makes me try them first. I just wish she'd warn me in advance.

Up until now, canning wasn't something I'd ever considered doing, not so much because there's little point to canning fruits and veggies for the cold, dark winter months when you live in Los Angeles, but more because, you know, botulism.

Yes, on the spectrum of back-to-the-good-'ol-days skills now enjoying resurgent popularity, only canning has the potential to poison your family if not done right. And there's a lot to get wrong.

Canning preserves food by sealing and heating it to the point where destructive bacteria can no longer live. Back in the days before refrigeration—and 24-hour grocery stores—canning played an important role in homemakery. "Putting up" that excess fruit, veg, and meat meant you fed your people all winter long. But it typically involves a lot of work and vigilance, not to mention constant supervision of a giant pot of boiling water.

Ah, but now comes help for the inept modern woman. (That would be me.) The Ball FreshTECH Automatic Home Canner, an appliance that takes the scary out of the canning process, promises that if you can plug it in and push the right button, you're on your way to livin' la vida 1914!

Even I can do that… on most days. So I gave it a try.

The appliance itself looks like a big slow-cooker, designed to sit on your counter. But since my kitchen was built in the '30s, it wouldn't fit on mine. So onto the table it went, along with the cereal boxes and stacks of my kids' schoolwork. It sat there for several weeks while I gathered the gumption to give it a go. The kids eyed it suspiciously.

"What are you up to now, Mom?" asked my teen girl. "What is that? A time machine or something?"

"Actually," I chirped. "It sort of is! It's a canner!"

"A canner."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"So I can… preserve foods. You know, for later."

She shot me a look only teenager daughters can inflict—the one that says, "Whatever," "I'm embarrassed for you," and "Why can't you be a normal mom?" all at once.

"Look, it's just an experiment," I said. "I'm gonna try and make my own pickles and salsa and stuff."

"We can buy pickles and salsa and stuff in jars at the store."

"I know! But I can make them myself at home! Isn't that cool?"

"No," she said. "It's superfluous."

"Watch your language."

She fled upstairs, and I decided I'd show those little suburban ingrates. I would try my home-canning device tonight. And I wouldn't share my pickles.

Of course, the whole point of canning is to preserve food for later use. You don't go through the trouble of canning something just to pop it open that night. You "put it up" in your pantry for up to a year. It's as old-school as it gets, and I imagine a very useful skill if you live on acreage in a snowy state and have a mess of kids to feed.

Me? I'm a second-generation Los Angeleno. Only movie stars have acreage. And I've never had to "open a can of summer," ever. (We're not even having a winter this year, apparently. Sorry, rest of the country.) Indeed, I have zero memories of anyone canning anything in my family. There is, however, a long tradition of driving three blocks to the supermarket (or these days, the farmers market) and buying fresh. We do it year-round, in fact.

Pondering this, I had to admit: My kid was right. Canning is superfluous. For me, anyway.

Still, I felt I should give it a go, just to see if I could.

My first idea was to make pickles, but upon finding out that they're simple to make at home and will keep in the refrigerator for weeks, I wondered what the upside to making them in my home-canning appliance would be.

Then I thought about jam. But since I don't have an orchard in my backyard, I'd have to buy lots of fruit and use heaps of sugar. And what about those four jars of jelly and jam already open in the back of my fridge, threatening to go bad? Or the half-dozen unopened jars of preserves given to me over the years by various friends who are the kinds of moms who know how to create such things?

Too wasteful. On to the next recipe.

I decided to go with salsa, because even though I can buy salsa anywhere (including excellent homemade ones at any number of Mexican markets in these parts), it somehow seemed cheaper to make and easier to preserve.

I was secretly counting on the heat of the peppers and garlic to help preserve things and protect against botulism anyway. I can only trust technology so much.

Using the recipe in the booklet that came with the appliance, I cut up my tomatoes, jalapeños, green onions, and garlic (none of which I grew myself, shamefully) while heating six half-pint Ball jars.

Once the jars sterilized, I took the first one out, filled it with salsa, wiped the lid, placed it back on the jar carefully, and returned it to the appliance. I did this four times. Then I pressed the button for salsa. Then I waited.

Half an hour later, I had several cans of salsa—sealed, and hopefully preserved—cooling off for up to 24 hours before being "put up" in my pantry, where they would allegedly keep for a year.

Do I feel like an urban homesteader? No. In fact, looking at my homemade salsa, I feel like a fake, largely because I know I am unlikely to break open this salsa in time for Super Bowl 2015. I've had too many bad experiences with food going wonky to risk it. Plus, I can buy all the salsa I want at Trader Joe's down the street.

But there is something to be said for knowing how to can in case, you know, a zombie apocalypse ever occurs. And barring that admittedly unlikely occurrence, the sheer fact that I learned something new bolsters the psyche a little in some secret, old-timey, home-ec-loving, feminine way I forgot was even in there, thanks to said Trader Joe's reminding me that such things are well, superfluous.

I'm told canning is addictive once you're secure in your knowledge. A home-canner is good for someone like me who has an interest in the whole thing, but also lives an urban lifestyle without a garden or basement—or a spacious kitchen, for that matter. However, I must admit that it does take a lot of the challenge and fun out of it.

Canning is such a part of our farming culture that the USDA has an entire website devoted to its National Center for Home Food Preservation. It's a deep fountain of knowledge that, dare I say, is more engrossing than an afternoon spent on Pinterest.

But without those hours on Pinterest, how will you know what to do with all those extra mason jars?